I keep comments off on this blog for a reason, but people have been emailing and IMing me about how my blog is both too impersonal and also too personal! When I started designing the layout, I had intended this blog to be the update blog for IC-E. But then I considered one of the only reasons IC-E came up… more or less as a holistic mechanism for creative release to keep me sane during my YoS. So, I guess the only way to placate both parties is to make my blog both personal and impersonal!

Many have asked me about my love life, and a few have been blatant enough to refer to it as my sex life. Officially, I am engaged to a brilliant med school junkie. But, Hamlet has driven me to a nunnery (read: my YoS), and so we’re separated as I try to find meaning in my art, forget the fact that I once had uncannily ambitious dreams in physics and bioengineering, and reminisce over all that’d occurred before… and as he figures out whether he’d MD/Ph.D or just defect to straight-on Ph.D. We’re technically engaged, but neither of us is sentimental or traditional enough to favor the ring. (I am the type who would cry if you buy me a dozen roses — it’s $100+… and what a waste! Rationally, I have allergies… and roses when you can buy me a nifty cool tech toy or fund my Software Sponsorship Foundation with the same amount!)

But, recently, though, my current SL relationship feels much more real. And it’s crazy because we have no idea what the other looks like — and the romance actually developed significantly back when we were in text chat only. The guy is actually bound in his own version of the YoS, and so… I dunno.

But, enough about me. Here’s something that might be of interest to you:

The Jan 28 Issue of Time featured an article advertised as “The Science of Romance.” But, I only picked it up because of an extremely long and slightly painful and maybe even bloody toilet session (lol, too personal?). Time sends free print issues to me, so every once in a while I fish through the magazine pile in the bathroom and feel obligated to read it — anyway, so while the web version I linked doesn’t show the article cover image… which flaunted Hamiltonian and Lagrangian dynamics, canonical variables and all that, a la equations H= and , I should mention I was only somewhat disappointed that the article didn’t explain how these equations related to love. But, the point is that I did learn something interesting that might explain for why SL relations often lead to childless marriages in RL or mere brief encounters.

Other than the usual things, the article mentioned two interesting points. Physical contact that allow for smell or taste can transmit the adequate MCH from partner to partner so that each can determine biologically compatible for reproduction. Women who are on birth control typically fail in this MCH detection.

Given the limitations of smell transmission when two parties are separated by distances of hundreds or thousands of miles, I guess the first physical meeting might be either shocking — “OMG, our MCH are sooo like incompatible” or the more optimal. I think most people would react out of politeness or nostalgia (the “addiction” part of the brain, according to this article) and attempt to believe and force belief in the latter.

In other news, I started to continue work on this (still untitled!) urban fantasy story I became obsessed with sometime in mid-2006. Its paradigm rests on a scientific-ish framework for your usual magick and all that… but also involves the concept of reincarnation, quite heavily. This whole SL/Internet-based romance thing where the other party does not actually get to experience much of the other party other than voice or perhaps a pointful and postedited (and thus unrepresentative and inaccurate) photo… and the fact that people still go crazy for each other despite this stoic technicality! In light of how the Internet allows people with potentially incompatible biologies to connect, I’m going to make the strong conjecture that the Internet and virtual worlds were inevitable because they’re fate’s will to overcome the randomness of biology’s “body assignment” to allow for estranged souls — destined soulmates — to connect, life after life.

A 25-year old American polymath of Taiwanese ancestry pretending to be old and Caucasian in Second Life. Semi-retired independent scholar also dabbling as an independent artist in new media, particularly theatre and the humanities—notably Shakespeare. Programmer, playwright and novelist. Formal academic background in http://portfolio.inacentaur.com/ina/scientist, philosophy, and bioengineering.

This is largely a personal blog which isn't always up-to-date. There's no one definitive way to stalk me ;-).